Using Twitter's Mentions for Efficient Emergency Message Propagation

Abstract

Using social media such as Twitter for emergency message propagation in times of crisis is widely thought to be a good addition to other traditional emergency population warning systems such as televisions. At the same time, most studies on Twitter influence propagation focus on retweetability of tweets. In this paper, we propose the importance of Twitter's mention function as another method of message propagation. Specifically, we show that graphs constructed from Twitter's retweet, mention, and reply functions show structural differences suggesting that using the mention function is the most efficient method of reaching the mass audience. Moreover, we show that influencers are the most prominent on the mention graph. From these analysis we conclude that we need further research in the direction of non-traditional methods of population warning systems. Further, this is the first paper that characterizes the structural differences of the retweet/mention/reply graphs in Twitter.